DETROIT — Detroit is famous for its music, from the Motown hits of the 1960s to the cutting-edge
punk of Iggy Pop and the rap of Eminem.

Little-known, though, is that Michigan was also fertile ground for folk music, brought to the
region by immigrants in the early 20th century and played in the logging camps, mines and factory
towns where they worked.

Folklorist Alan Lomax discovered the music in 1938 when he visited the Midwest on his 10-year
cross-country trek to document American folk music for the Library of Congress.

A trove of his Michigan recordings is being publicly released for the first time by the library,
coinciding with the 75th anniversary of Lomax’s trip and causing a stir among folk-music fanciers
and history buffs.

“It was a fantastic field trip; hardly anything has been published from it,” said Todd Harvey,
the Lomax collection’s curator at the Library of Congress.

The Michigan batch contains about 900 tracks and represents a dozen ethnicities.

Lomax, son of musicologist John A. Lomax, spent three months in Michigan on his research, which
also took him through Appalachia and the Deep South. He recorded the songs on a suitcase-sized disc
recorder powered by his car’s battery.

The trip was supposed to cover much of the Upper Midwest, but Lomax made only a few recordings
elsewhere in the region.

The collection includes acoustic blues from Southern transplants, including one-time Robert
Johnson collaborator Calvin Frazier; a lumberjack ballad called
Michigan-I-O; and a lament about life in the copper mines of the Upper Peninsula called
31st Level Blues, performed by the Floriani family, of Croatian descent.

The 250-disc recordings of about 125 performers, along with eight reels of film footage and
photographs, reflect the rich mixture of cultures in Depression-era Michigan, where European
immigrants and Southerners came seeking jobs.